The Hubski team discussed this in depth last night and I wanted to give you all an update. We discussed further options for nuking someone from your Hubski experience and the possibility of expanding the muting option, as well as whether or not a muted person should be allowed to PM you.

At this point, we're not changing the way muting works or adding a new feature. We revisited our previous discussions and notes from ~365 days ago about a blocking feature and a lot more. We came to the conclusion that it does more harm than good at this point and that people will likely use it much more lightly than we would intend it to be used.

One item that came up was, "what happens if you block someone from replying to your comment?" Can they reply, but you can't see them? What happens to the children of that comment? Can they not reply? What does this do to a comment feed if there are a lot of blocked people?

There are obviously circumstances where preventing someone from commenting on your comments would be a positive. If someone is going around and following you and replying, "fuck you, dickwad" on every comment, waiting for the larger Hubski community to more widely mute them would be far too slow and too painful.

However, if someone is replying to every comment of yours and harassing you, the likelihood of them creating a new account is also high and the mute or block feature wouldn't prevent them from accessing you anyways.

The reality is, if blocking were implemented, a lot of the blocking that would occur would be towards people who simply have dissenting or ignorant opinions that differ from your own. Blocking those types of people is not a Hubski we want to encourage. To quote myself from a couple years ago:

As much as it angered me, shocked me, and still makes my brain flip every time I think about it, there are real people out there that think like that. And those people are sitting across the table from me thinking "I can't believe there are people who think like that!"

It takes all types to make the world, and Hubski, go around. Echo-chambers and nuking people from existence will never help you grow and become globally informed on any topic. Instead, it contributes to your overall ignorance and sets up a microcosm that leads you to believe the world operates in a way it does not. People are dickheads sometimes. People disagree with you sometimes. People can hurt you at sometimes. That's part of the human condition and, in turn, Hubski.

Personal harassment is one area where I feel it is necessary to have the ability to prevent someone from contacting you in all forms. Luckily, that level of internet-hatred has yet to appear on Hubski, as far as we are aware. If it does, or has, please let myself, mk, or thenewgreen know via PM and we will take the steps needed and come up with a transparent plan of counter-attack for addressing issues that may arise moving foward.

cc minimum_wage because I know you are looking forward to a blocking feature.